I mean I could talk about how during Saturday’s fartlek, when I got to top speed I felt like an epileptic duck, totally uncoordinated and that it was worrisome.  But that I reasoned “You’re not used to fast wheels – maybe give a notch less, work up to it and trust it’ll improve.”  And how I believed it.

I could share the fact that with so many friends training for Spring marathons proudly reporting hard interval and tempo sessions, it doesn’t matter how many miles I run, I feel like a total slacker.  Then I remind myself that I gosh darn enjoy my runs and I’m getting there in my own sweet time – I just need to own it.  Then I could roll my eyes because I typed “just need to own it” which is so psychobabbly stupid.

I could also mention how this week will be a cutback since I had 4 consecutive high weeks so ~75mi sounds like a good idea.

I could tell you how for the last 2 weeks, I thought I was putting a tablespoon of peanut butter in my 5-grain cereal but then yesterday on a whim used a measuring spoon and discovered my dollops contain twice that, so I’ve been eating 200-300 extra calories per day. Classic.

And then I could post my week in review.

Me At Work
Here’s a photo I posted on FB the other day.  In all the years I’ve been doing voiceovers, this is the first photo I have of me in the studio.  This particular job was a couple commercials for a car superstore in Detroit.  It’s rare to have 4 people on mic for one spot – usually you do your schtick separately or there’ll be one, maybe two other actors with you, so this was fun.

Please Friends, Be Careful Out In The Big World
One of the sweetest gals in my FB collection of friends was injured badly on Saturday by a hit-n-run cyclist while she was out running.  She hit the pavement hard, fracturing her skull with brain and ear bleeding and was in ICU till late yesterday.

I think of the potential for this on my own route since runners and cyclists share the path (and we all make unexpected moves from time to time), so keep an eye out as best you can folks.  Meanwhile, rest well, Odessa, thinking of you.

I had a good workout on Friday, 12x200s as planned.  No drama or head trips, I had fun with it.  Saturday was a beautiful slow recovery run thanks to the snow.  Then yesterday sucked.

It was only a 13-miler but I was so tired, it felt like a 20 when all was said and done.  I was tired because the girl upstairs (who spent the whole of December out of town so I was able to sleep straight through the night for 4 blessed weeks) is now back and waking up between 4:30 and 6am, so that means I do, too.  I go back to sleep, but it’s fitful and I have to use that stupid white-noise machine.  Part of it is my fault as well, since my bedtime has climbed to 1:30am lately – a habit I need to get under control.

Anyway, I was sluggish as hell, it was super cold and windy and they did a weird job of clearing the bike path, leaving large swaths of slippery snow.  After the first few miles, I almost changed it to be a run for time instead of distance but it eventually cleared out for the bulk of the run.

One thing is for sure, I cannot wait for California.  On yesterday’s run, I was doing a checklist of all the stuff I won’t need to bring, as in jacket, gloves, tights, hat, etc.  Just 2 weeks now!  Not feeling much for the race, but I’m super excited to see my friends and go somewhere I’ve never been, even for a few short days.

As for the race, my workouts have been inconsistent these last weeks that to expect to magically hit this one hard seems naive.  I’m fine with it though, especially since the whole subject of taking a real break is on the forefront and probably 2 years overdue.  That said, I hope this is the last race for a very long while that needs the preface “It won’t be my best, but I’m cool with that”.

So here’s to an excess of teeth-gnashing, PR-grabbing, competitive energy building within the next few months, for me and any of you who could also use a shot.  Say it with me now: “Grrrrrrrr”<—-practice daily for future race kill.

That’s it for this thrill-a-rama.  Have a happy Monday, folks!

Anyway, it raises my hackles reading it (akin to doing a commercial for cigarettes) though at the same time, it’s admittedly fascinating.  I can’t write too much about it for confidentiality, but the whole first half of the script is basically a sales pitch for being beautiful.  So many Pros! -  higher pay in the workplace, the ability to win more arguments, plus you get more help from strangers.

My non-divinely mathematical eyes are rolling outta my head.  Though it sucks that it’s true.

A Little Blog Help, Please
No biggie and I don’t need everybody’s help, just those who are kind enough to subscribe to this blog and any of you fab Bloggers who link it on your blogrolls.

Here’s the deal:  Remember a few months ago, when I got my hands on the domain girlinmotion.com so I could lose the dashed version, girl-in-motion.com?  The switchover was fine except for one thing: I (and my hosting company) am not able to get the RSS feed redirected properly.

This means I have 2 identical feeds:  the original www.girl-in-motion.com/feed with the bulk of my subscribers and www.girlinmotion.com/feed with 30 newer ones.   I need to consolidate  you guys but can’t do it without your assistance.

Additionally, as long as the original girl-in-motion.com is linked around the interwebs, I’m stuck having to hold onto that extra domain name.  I’ll eventually dump it permanently and when I do, those links aren’t going to work anymore.

The Request
Blog Subscribers: I’d be grateful if you could add a subscription to www.girlinmotion.com/feed (or click here to do it) and then delete your old subscription.

Blog Owners: if you’ve got me linked on your blog, just edit the link from www.girl-in-motion.com to www.girlinmotion.com.  That’s it!

Thank you!

Feed Readers Are Cool
If you don’t read your blogs through a reader, I highly recommend it, it makes blog reading a lot easier and faster: you don’t have to check to see if your favorite blogs have updated, they’ll appear in the reader as soon as there’s a new entry…plus it’s free.  I’ve tried a couple and my favorite is Google’s, it seems to update fastest.

And that’s it for the day.  Saved you from having to hear about how damn hot it is here again.  Oh OK – really fucking hot.  Groin pull is getting better though, should be good for quality on Friday.  Yay, life goes on.

I had a voiceover in the morning at a studio that I don’t get a lot of work from, not for any reason but that I haven’t built up any relationships there, though they have my demo and that’s how I got this job.

Now, when you do voiceovers, the client is often there at the session – “client” usually meaning  the ad agency or whatever company has hired you, though sometimes the actual client client is there (meaning the company who hired the ad agency to begin with).  Then sometimes, like today, there’s no one but you and the engineer present, but the client (in this case the ad agency) does a phone patch, so they are able to be with you at the session without having to physically be in the studio.

Today’s session was uber fun because the ad agency fellow was a total sweetie, before I started he asked me all sorts of questions about my background, where I was from and things that didn’t have anything to do with the job.  When it got time to do the spot, they were so happy with it that one of the ad people, remembering I’d said I was from Arkansas, asked me to audition for another spot with a Southern accent.  So I may get another job from this one, plus the impression I left the engineer with was that I’m a pleasure to work with which will surely get passed to the higher-ups.

Oh, and I got a parking spot right in front of the building, which in downtown Philly is no small feat.  Then when I got home, I got a spot right in front of my apartment.  A lucky day.

Today’s run

48 degrees!! Capris and a top…heaven.  11mi w/Billat 30-30s (ended up doing 21 reps).

When I do a quality session it’s usually bookended with a pretty good chunk of miles – today, 6.75mi till I started the fast part.  Because I don’t want to “use myself up” before I get to the work, I always take those miles preceding it very easy – usually 8:45s before I get to the good stuff.  But today was different.

At about 2.5 miles, there was a large group of middle-school boys running on the path.  They weren’t too fast but to get past them, I sped up to around 8:15 pace.  After I passed, I considered slowing back down because I didn’t want to compromise the 30-30s but it hit me that I’ve been spending a lot of time in 8:30-8:45 land these days or sub 8:00s, but hardly any time at 8:15ish, though I did more of that last cycle.

It felt pretty good going that pace, easier than the 8:45s for some reason so I kept on.  Then, when it came time for the workout, I had no problems, in fact I was faster this week than last.  So, many thanks to the school boys, you helped me decide to do more 8:15ish runs in the next few weeks.

Arms and Legs

You know the arm/leg connection?  That if you move your arms faster, your legs will go faster as well?  I’ve known this tidbit for a long time but don’t make good use of it because 1. I always get the feeling that I’m wasting energy using the arms that way and 2. I’m not able to speed my arms up easily, it’s like the pace rut I mention above, making my arms move faster isn’t as easy as just thinking it, when you’re already going fast it seems like they’re moving as fast as they can.

But no.  This time I made a concerted effort to really pump my arms and let it see if it tuckered me out more or what.  The What is that I went fucking fast!  I had a few sub 6s in there, which I never do.  Yeah, it was only for 30secs each, but 5:xx is not something I ever see.  So I’ll be messing around with this again.  It’s not something I think is useful for regular marathony stuff (aside from the Billats, of course) but when I get to do 400s come Spring, I’ll see if it’s transferable.  I still think it makes you more tired but maybe that’s because you end up running faster in general.

So that’s my great day today.  Hope you guys had a great one, too!

Backtracking, Tuesday was quite a good run – hill reps day -  so 10mi w/5 x.25mi repeats.  When I did these 3 weeks ago, I was pretty satisfied with the workout though if you remember, once home and looking at my logs, realized I’d lost quite a chunk of fitness since last Fall’s buildup.  So this Tuesday was great because it was 10sec faster per rep, had an additional rep than the last time and a lower heart rate, to boot. Plus, they were all into the wind.  A needed confidence booster.

Wednesday was an 8mi recovery, then yesterday, a not-so-hot tempo.  It was 13mi. w/4tempo and I struggled to keep the tempo miles at anything approaching a good pace, they veered from 7:20s to 7:25, which really super sucks but honestly, I was ok with it!

Having Tuesday’s good workout was like, “Ok, this was just an off day, there’s still good things going on beyond this one run.”   I rarely do morning runs in the winter anyway, so maybe I wasn’t all there, but also…the bear! My last tempo mile was crazy fighting that gnarly wooly creature off.  Thankfully, the tempo portion ended just in front of the restrooms.   I guess you need to be careful of what you talk about, or else it might come round to bite you in the ass.  Literally.

Today is a day off, but well spent.  I made a narration demo!  I love Mike and Deb, the studio owners.  They’re a blast to hang with and she makes a mean chicken casserole.  Here are the fruits of our labor.  (warning: it’s not at all thrilling but since I’m such a media whore these days, may as well post it).

Other than that, I’ve become enamored with Facebook this week. Last night I made a Fan Page for Gifted Runner and it’s already got 50 fans.  Half are my friends while the other half are people I don’t even know and they’re actually going to the website, so this is a very cool development. Didn’t realize just how useful it could be, so if you have a site, I highly recommend making a Page for it. And once you get 25 Fans, you can go to www.facebook.com/username to get a pretty URL for it, so I’ve got www.facebook.com/giftedrunner. Niiice.

There’s very little on the page right now but one thing I posted is a promise of new designs by February 9th. How’s that for a publicly self-imposed kick in the ass? Anyway, if you’d like to become a Fan of Gifted Runner, please do. And while I’m in beggar mode, if you want to add me to your friend pile, I’m game: www.facebook.com/flo.karp (you can get a nice URL for your personal page, too).

And with that, I’m going to enjoy the rest of this frigid day off by doing absolutely nothing and not eating shredded wheat because I have 10 w/8MP tomorrow. Just wish it wasn’t going to be 14 degrees. Winter bites.

The intervals went 3:20, 3:18, 3:20, 3:19, 3:21 (avg pace 6:39mi).  They’re about 5 seconds off where I was in September, but hey…last January I did these at 7:04 pace, so no complaints.

One thing I’m looking forward to after this marathon business is over: shorter speed and tempo workouts – and I don’t mean the quality portion.  Because I want to keep the mileage at a certain level and endurance is part of the marathon game, I’m compelled to have that extra padding around the interval session to get at least 9 miles, so today I did 3.5 warmup and 2.75 cooldown for 9.54 miles total.  Ditto the tempos, they’re sitting within 13 and 14 milers.  It’ll be so nice to just do 1.5 for warmup and cooldown.

In non-running stuff, I finished a major site overhaul on Fish Pie and added some new designs, so today I have to work on getting a newsletter out for that.  Here’s one of the new ones:

Also, looks like the narration/medical voiceover demo might not be as simple as I’d hoped. I thought I’d just compile bits of past jobs, same as a commercial demo, but since it’s largely pharmaceutical stuff (with all the legal crap surrounding it) I might not be able to do that.  I’m waiting to hear from the studio to see if I have to rerecord something new or will have to spend some time sifting for generic bits.  Yawn.

And that’s it for now.  Have beautiful runs, my lovelies.

On this run, I discovered my Half and 10K pace are no longer what they used to be, in fact, I was working hard at 7:20 pace!  The good thing is, I’m totally cool with it.  Why?  I looked back at my log and saw that for the last 8 weeks, I’ve averaged 46mi/week.  This included a taper week and race week.  That’s a 35% reduction in average weekly mileage!  And except for a couple short jabs at speed (a crappy interval session, one fartlek and last week’s 3MP), it was all easy miles.

I have no regrets about taking it easy – I worked so hard the last cycle, the step-back was necessary for my mind as much as my body.  This is all undiscovered territory though, since by this time last year I’d spent a month working on 5Ks and continued that push until the Half in May.  I’ve never taken such a sizable “vacation” so it’ll be interesting to see how fast it comes back.  I don’t suppose it’ll take too long but if it does, no problem, I’ll just change my goal.  It’s lovely having nothing to prove.

On the financial marathon front, after months of working on this one ginormous project (a music t-shirt/gift site) I am finally about two hours away from putting in the last few products – no small feat considering it has over 11,000 items!  If it wasn’t for my new-found determination, I’d have been working on this for the better part of the year, but thanks to Firefox iMacros and some huge dollops of elbow grease, I’ll be done after dinner.

Speaking of the financial marathon and the universe providing blah blah blah, it seems to be continuing in a positive manner.  I lost a voiceover this month because they’ve stopped production on the drug, but the woman in charge recommended me for something else and spent a good deal of time discussing my putting together a medical/narration demo and exactly what she’d like included.  I’ve already done all the characters on assorted jobs (doctor, patient, etc) so I just need to compile it.  My laziness with getting VO work has been utterly stupid because it’s so lucrative and I’m good at it,  yet I truly dislike marketing myself.  But after that conversation, I’ve got no excuse, she basically laid it out on a silver platter.

Also, there’s an Internet Marketing forum I frequent (lurk at actually, because the people there scare me – it’s hard core).  Anyway, a regular there posted an offer for free mentoring of 10 people for 90 days, which includes twice-a-week webinars with question/answers after.  You had to PM him and explain why you should be chosen and I got picked!  I’m thrilled beyond belief because I’ve been dabbling in some of that stuff the last few months but really need guidance to understand some key ideas.  And I’d never have written the guy if it hadn’t been for the financial marathon.

So 2010 looks good so far:

Running-wise, I’m learning more about myself and relieving a great deal of the pressure I created, trusting that this is a long-term process and that it doesn’t have to be one huge tidal wave, that there’ll be ebbs and flows.  Also, the UPS guy just dropped off some Mizuno Inspire 5′s from RunningWarehouse, on sale since the 6s came out, so I got two pairs (ah, excess!).

Work-wise, I’m learning that specific goals and making interim steps to achieve them rocks!  Put it out there and opportunity will come to meet you.

Hygiene-wise, I finally laundered my fleece jacket this morning, which has been on too many runs without a wash.  The geese on the bike-path were becoming offended, now they can breathe.

All is right with the world.